French painter and photographer, born on 13 April 1900 in Agen, died on 3 March 1976 in Bordeaux.
Life
Pierre Molinier trained with his father and the sculptor Pierre Augustin de Fumadelles. He began by painting landscapes and took up photography at the age of eighteen. After his military service (1921-1922) he went to Paris to copy the masters, then settled in Bordeaux, where he spent most of his life. His first solo exhibition took place in 1931 at the Galerie A. Grézy in Bordeaux.
In 1955 he wrote to André Breton and sent him photographs of his paintings. Breton welcomed him into the Surrealist group: in 1956 the Galerie À l’Étoile scellée gave him an exhibition in Paris, and he took part in the International Surrealist Exhibition of 1959-1960. In 1969 Jean-Jacques Pauvert published L’Art magique de Molinier, with a foreword by Breton. As his health declined, he took his own life in his Bordeaux flat on 3 March 1976.
The work
Paintings, photographs and photomontages make up an erotic and transgressive body of work, deliberately provocative. From 1965 Molinier staged himself in his studio-boudoir in Bordeaux: using a remote shutter release and photomontage, he made cross-dressed self-portraits, gathered notably in the series of Cent photographies érotiques (1965-1976).
The gallery showed an original photographic print, Hanel Sechs ! (18.5 x 14.5 cm), in the exhibition “The Hold of the Senses. Erotic Variations” (11 February to 19 March 2022). Molinier was also included in the exhibition “The Subversion of Images” (24 January to 8 March 2025).
Exhibitions and collections
- Centre Pompidou, Paris, 1979-1980; “Scènes de la séduction”, Rencontres d’Arles, 1998
- “Molinier rose saumon”, FRAC Nouvelle-Aquitaine MÉCA, Bordeaux, 2023
- Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou; Centre national des arts plastiques; Musée des Beaux-Arts and CAPC, Bordeaux; Musée d’Art moderne et contemporain de Strasbourg; SFMOMA, San Francisco; Musée de la Photographie, Charleroi